Every change in communications medium causes big changes in culture, since cuneiform, then writing were introduced. Email was a culture changer in the 90's. Now, email is being upstaged by social media. The Wall
Street Journal reports, in an article, The End of Email?

In August 2009, 276.9
million people used email across the U.S., several European countries,
Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2
million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking
and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

Things have changed.
The net has grown much faster and email, which was born when we logged
on with a screeching noise, slow phone line connection and paid by the
minute, is now an "old" technology. Try to get your teen or twenty
something to check it for your messages and you'll often get a reply--
"text me, or post to my facebook wall." The Journal article likens
the change to moving from checking in and out, in the "old days" of the
90's, to being awash in a constant "river" of connection.

You don't need to call your friend to see what he or she is up to
because you can just check your Facebook social graph or the latest
tweet to see where she is and what she's been up to.

"The young people today don't know how to talk," a 77 year old Jewish
mother told me the other day. I corrected her. "Actually, they talk,
but primarily using text messaging, instand messaging and facebook,
myspace, and if they's a bit older, linkedin postings, with some tweets
thrown in.

What the 77 year old perceived as a drop in communication is actually a
change. A lot of the over 30 people who started on facebook signed on
to stay in touch with their kids at college or to keep up with their
kids in high school-- if the kids were willing to friend them.

But that was so 2006. Now, the social media tsunami has flowed much
further and for some time, facebook's new sign-ups have been much older
than the college students who got it started.

The new media-- facebook, twitter, instant messages, text messages from
phones-- are more immediate and can be less intrusive. You don't need
to write a summarizing report of your vacation or business trip. You
will have posted to facebook or tweeted the trip, step by step.

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Then there's spam. Email has become a major annoyance, in terms of the
noise level. Spam filters remove 98% of the worst cialis and instant
wealth offerings but it is still cluttered with so much chaff. Facebook
lets you filter your social graph-- that river of information that
comes to you from your "friends" and twitter lets you get VERY
selective when you use search tools like tweetdeck to just look at
tweets with keywords that interest you.

Email is not going to go away, just as snail mail has not disappeared.
But technology is changing the way email plays a role. Younger people
are treating email like they do newspapers-- they don't pay much
attention. And over 30's need to understand that the means of
communication are moving quickly into "the river."

The new, "always on" technologies like cable, fios and satellite web
access have been game changers. Muhammad in Peshawar can gmail instant
message me and we can have a conversation that isn't slowed down by
email's characteristics. I can also keep on writing my article without
having to do the more intense phone interaction. (The phone is so dead
for many under 30's. They much prefer the less demanding, less
attention intensive texting.)

With the social graph and links within tweets on twitter an comments on
blog sites, the experience of communication is less time sensitive and
more media rich. It's also more random. In a world that has been
ratcheting towards shorter and shorter attention spans, with more and
more people being characterized as ADD, such randomness is actually
more attractive and flexible to the roaming, distracted communication
consumer. Maggie Jackson, in her book, Distracted,
suggests that this distraction and loss of focus could impend a coming
dark age. But it may also portend a growth in connections, in relating
using new tools and ways.

The challenge, Jackson told me, in a radio show interview, is to
maintain depth of communication and connection. If my 77 year old
writes off the changed means of communication as the ending of
communication, then there's a problem. If she can learn to re-connect
with the new tools-- texting, facebook, she may find that she gets to
know more about her kids and the rest of her mishpocha than she ever did before.

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Businesses are just beginning to catch on that the future of business is about customer relationships using tools that didn't exist a few years ago. That's why there's a whole new job category out there-- new media/social media specialist.

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.